Swanstrom, Lisa. “divination.py”: A Lyric Algorithm for the Augury of Attunement.” ArtJournal Open (Fall 2019).
This short article was an experiment that came out of my participation in the BioArtSociety’s Field_Notes Laboratory in Kilpisjärvi, Finland. Although I’d written about code’s expressive potential, I’d never tried to express myself through code. It was a lot of fun, which surprised me. This link will take you to Hannah Star Roger’s lovely overview of the entire Field_notes project.
Here’s an excerpt from my article:
In the ancient world, augury described the act of discerning the future from the behavior of birds: their feathers, their entrails, their patterns of flight. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder devotes an entire chapter to the biology of birds, providing a detailed description of each kind—size, wingspan, habits of predation—and, when applicable, its divinatory import. Roosters, for instance, “have a knowledge of the stars” and “give or withhold the most favorable omens.”
And here is the direct link to the web site that Scott Svatos and I collaborated on:
http://www.svatos.com/divination/app.html
